Dracula and the curse of the mummy

An Egyptian mummy which for 30 years lay almost forgotten in a damp warehouse in Hull has been identified as the corpse that breathed life into a whole genre of horror.

The unidentified body, wrapped in quality linen preserved with beeswax and a trace of bitumen, arrived in Hull from Whitby, where it is believed to have been seen by the novelist Bram Stoker in 1890.

Stoker, business manager for the actor Sir Henry Irving, created the doyen of vampires, Dracula, in a novel partly set in Whitby. It established an appetite for tales of the undead which has lasted more than 100 years.

In 1903, Stoker wrote the Jewel of the Seven Stars, in which an embalmed Egyptian princess comes to life in England, with goose-pimpling consequences. It inspired a second ghoul genre, and ever since, bandaged feet have been stalking darkened corridors, to bring ancient vengeance to the modern west.

Joann Fletcher, a Yorkshire-based Egyptologist, stumbled on the Bram Stoker connection when she was asked to examine Hull museum's Egyptian collection. When she finished, she remembers commenting that they had some lovely pieces, but what a pity they had no human remains because she loved mummies.

"And they said 'Aha!' They had two mummies, which had obviously been in the wars - quite literally, when in the second world war in 1943 the place had been bombed, and the mummies had suffered damage as a result."

She began her detective work, and traced one of the mummies back to Whitby. It had once belonged to Sir George Elliot MP, a self-made financier and friend of Benjamin Disraeli, who had gone to Egypt as an adviser to the khedive, the viceroy under the Ottomans. While there, Elliot acquired a collection of antiquities, including a mummy, believed to be of an Egyptian princess.

Elliot later settled in Whitby's Royal Crescent, and was almost certainly visited by Bram Stoker, then just at the start of his career as a writer. Biographers think that Stoker, who was Irish, had been inspired in his student days in Dublin by a mummy once owned by Oscar Wilde's father.

Dr Fletcher argues there is a more immediate explanation: the Jewel of the Seven Stars was a kind of sequel to the novel Dracula. "You've got this same reanimated aristocrat, with the mummified Egyptian princess who is brought to life in a remote seaside location - on a dark and stormy night and all that - by this group of Victorian gentleman scholars," she said.

"Think of the seaside location, the fact that Elliot's mummy is described as an Egyptian princess in correspondence of the time and then the Jewel of the Seven Stars is published in 1903, with its original scary ending where the princess goes bonkers and kills everybody. And all of a sudden, in 1903, a mummy is suddenly donated to the Whitby museum and right round the country, people seem anxious to donate mummified body parts to their own local museums. The mummy in the corner of the drawing room was no longer a curiosity; it was now seen as something that could potentially come to life and throttle you."

Stoker's mummy novel was filmed at least three times: in 1971 as Blood From the Mummy's Tomb ("A severed hand beckons from an open grave!"); in 1980 as the Awakening ("They thought they had buried her forever!"); and in 1997 as Legend of the Mummy ("And ancient queen. Her deadly curse. The terror begins").

The mummy went from Whitby museum to Hull museum. After being bombed, it lay in a warehouse on Humberside until the 1970s. It still awaits final conservation.

Ironically, on closer examination, the mummy turned out not to be a princess. Although a photograph of the original X-rays taken in the 1930s has survived, sophisticated portable CT-scanning equipment has now been used to peer beneath the wrappings. The cadaver had the wide pelvis, gracile bone structure and delicate brow ridge that originally led people to identify it as feminine. The clear presence of a penis, however, confirmed that the mummy had been a man.

· The True Curse of the Mummy is on Channel 5 at 8pm on January 3.

Under wraps

· Tomb raiders took more than ornaments. They also trafficked preserved human flesh as a form of alternative medicine